Posts Tagged With: Creativity exercise

In The Energy That Finds Its Source, I shared how I stumbled upon a strategy through meditation that greatly affected my artwork in a positive way. I want to build on that by discussing something a number of us do unconsciously—but brought to consciousness can generalize to different contexts of your life. It increases clarity and mental/emotional flexibility, in addition to creativity. I’ll use writing as a springboard for an example here.

One of the biggest challenges fiction writers have is to breathe life into the characters of their stories, to make them believable. This is particularly true if your book is character-driven. You want readers to connect with the story and those in it: to love or hate them. A reader of my latest book Portals to the Vision Serpent wrote to say how she couldn’t stand Sybilla, who features prominently in the novel—until she really understood her. Then she had great empathy. Even if the book is plot-driven, you want the characters’ actions to make some level of sense from their eyes.

We all have a specialized, individual template we live by. Here’s a quick review on how that happens. Your brain codes experiences you have. The original coding usually takes place early in life. The coding becomes your perceptions…translating to the beliefs you have about yourself, others, the world in general, even what’s possible. This template also becomes the filter through which you experience your life. You develop strategies for thinking and living that further reinforce the original beliefs—those that support and those that get in your way. When something significant happens to disrupt the old beliefs, things can shift dramatically.

Characters in a novel are no different. Here’s a way to uncover their templates by “stepping into” different perspectives.

From your “self” position as the writer, note how you experience different characters: the nonverbal signals, the way they speak, your own response to them.

Now taking each character at a time, imagine you can slide right into their body, look out of their eyes, become them—rather than witnessing them—and answer these questions: What is their family of origin like? Based on what they unconsciously ingested then, how do they experience their own identity, who they are? Note the trickle down effect: What beliefs were generated? What about capabilities? Resulting actions? How they experience their environment? This way you can really get inside the hearts and minds of the characters.

Then step back. By being a detached observer you get additional valuable information. Given what you discovered about your individual characters, now you can really get a bead on important dynamics between the major players and incorporate them into your writing.

By using a method like this, you also invite your reader to tag along through your writing, to undergo the same discovery and identify with different characters. They’re playing out the human condition, no different than the rest of us. We are all who we are based upon where we’ve been. But when something of great enough significance interjects itself, triggering a change in one character…it also affects the others in close proximity. That’s how things get shaken up; the story becomes so much more interesting; the characters can grow in various ways.

I realize in the writing of this piece that, because this strategy is so engrained in me, it’s another way of describing what I wrote about in The Energy That Finds Its Source. I was very much in the “self” when I was meditating. But when I came out of meditation, I became the “observer.” When the artwork communicated with me, I may have been in “other” position…or an unexplainable esoteric element occurred…

Of course, you can use what I’ve written here as a guideline to explore other aspects of your own life, not just your creative outlets. This is a brief primer toward self-discovery and relationship dynamics that I use with clients as a springboard for transformation.

I’ve adapted the content of this post from my mentoring program Navigating Your Lifepath addressing how to live through your deeply held values—and thrive.

One of the biggest challenges fiction writers have is to breathe life into the characters of their stories, to make them believable. This is particularly true if your book is character-driven. You want readers to connect with the story and those in it, to love or hate them. A reader of my latest book Portals to the Vision Serpent wrote to say how she couldn’t stand Sybilla, who features prominently in the novel—until she really understood her. Then she had great empathy. Even if the book is plot-driven, you want the characters’ actions to make some level of sense from their standpoint.

We all have a specialized, individual template that we live by. Here’s a quick review on how that happens. Your brain codes experiences you have. The original coding usually takes place early in life. The coding becomes your perceptions, which translates to the beliefs you have about yourself, others, the world in general, and what’s possible. This template also becomes the filter through which you experience your life. You develop strategies for thinking and living that further reinforce the original beliefs—those that support and those that get in your way. When something significant happens to disrupt the old beliefs, things can shift dramatically.

Your characters are no different. Here’s a way to uncover their templates by “stepping into” different perspectives.

From your “self” position as the writer, note how you experience different characters: the nonverbal signals, the way they speak, your own response to them.

Now taking each character at a time, imagine you can slide right into their body, look out of their eyes, become them—rather than witnessing them—and answer these questions: What is their family of origin like? Based on what they unconsciously ingested then, how do they experience their own identity, who they are? Note the trickle down effect: What beliefs were generated? What about capabilities? Resulting actions? How they experience their environment? This way you can really get inside the hearts and minds of the characters.

Then step back. By being a detached observer you get additional valuable information. Given what you discovered about your individual characters, now you can really get a bead on important dynamics between the major players and incorporate them into your writing.

Antigua bells.Photo credit: Carla Woody

By using a method like this, you also invite your reader to tag along through your writing, to undergo the same discovery and identify with different characters playing out the human condition, no different than the rest of us. We are all who we are based upon where we’ve been. But when something of great enough significance interjects itself triggering a change in one character…it also affects the others in close proximity. That’s how things get shaken up; the story becomes so much more interesting; the characters can grow in various ways.

Of course, you can use what I’ve written here as a guideline to explore aspects of your own life, not just writing. This is a brief primer toward self-discovery and relationship dynamics that I use with clients as a springboard for transformation. I’ve adapted the content of this post from my mentoring program Navigating Your Lifepath, which guides folks on how to live through their deeply held values—and thrive.

What are ways you can imagine exploring perspectives would be useful to you? Let me know your ideas or experiences in the comments below.

At the tail end of National Poetry Writing Month, I want to sneak in this story of a way my creative juices were unexpectedly activated. Several years ago I traveled to L.A. to participate in a group experience. A friend of mine flew down from Denver to accompany me. We would be staying with friends who had recently bought an old mansion in an area undergoing gentrification. It was an incredible place—three stories’ worth—with a conservatory and even a library. The new owners envisioned it as gathering place for the arts community, avant-garde thinkers and adventurers, as well as their home. They were intent on bringing it back to original condition.

While I went to the event, my traveling companion—a horticulturist by profession—had volunteered to design a garden and brought his computer for that purpose. When I returned a day later from my group activity, I discovered that things hadn’t progressed as planned. It would be some hours added to our original departure point. There wasn’t much room for me in the design process. Everyone was crowded around the computer screen in the breakfast room. I was more interested in enjoying the ambience of the house anyway.

Next to all the design activity was a huge old-fashioned kitchen, a big island in the middle and a formal butler’s pantry. My eye caught the jumble on the refrigerator door: hundreds of words on little magnets, arranged into witty sayings, others silly or downright gross. That was the first time I’d seen magnetic poetry—and I was intrigued.

The longer I stood there looking at the possibilities, words became fragments and then merged to form a thread. After an hour of fun, this is what presented itself.

We must be mad

soaring playfully like a thousand storms

under the winter moon.

Will you think me crazy

for smearing my skin with a diamond symphony?

Ache deliriously, run frantically

when I shine,

drunk on beauty.

Magnetic words now grace my own refrigerator door. I couldn’t wait to get home and purchase some. I keep some finished pieces displayed. Others are phrases lodged there to remind me they could be worked more when I’m in the mood. I threaten to publish them all one day in a little book called Refrigerator Poetry, maybe illustrated with my artwork. But what I like best is how these word magnets work on your creativity. They’re almost irresistible. And I always chuckle when I discover some poems or messages that friends left, unbeknownst to me. The latest was a brief note from my latest house sitters, discovered weeks after I’d returned home. If you can’t wait to have some of your own, you can find magnetic words here. But I warn you: You’ll find yourself dawdling in front of your refrigerator consistently—not to tempt yourself with ice cream or pie—but to feed your inner poet!

Like this:

A few years ago, I was in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and copied these words from a plaque on the wall in one of the many rooms that contained art works from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s.

A young painter asked Gaugin for advice and he answered, ‘Do not paint too much from nature. Art is an abstraction; extract it from nature while dreaming in front of it and pay more attention to the act of creation than to the result.’

Reminders

Cézanne’s refuge on Ste. Victoire mountain.

Paul Gaugin’s words punctuated, for me, similar reminders coming over the course of travels in Provence with my group, which then culminated in Paris. As always, those things that stand out to us are what we’re there to encounter. This theme was mine to hear and one that is still prevalent in pockets of France, especially Provence.

Mont Ste. Victoire is a hulking giant of a mountain dominating the Provençal landscape. Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne was fascinated with it. Painting it numerous times, he even had a refuge near the top, to the point we hiked and picnicked having our own luncheon on the grass painters Manet and Picasso might have found acceptable.*

Near Ste. Victoire’s base sits Mas de Cadenet, a winery that has been in the same family since 1813 producing exquisite examples of Côtes de Provence. We stopped by and Matthieu Négrel was waiting for us.

For such a young man, Matthieu was quite the inspiration. Only 25 at that time, he was set to take on a large role when his father retires. Indeed, he had already stepped into sharing many of the important decisions about cultivation of the vineyard and wine-making. We even had a discussion about what it was like to have such a family legacy and the expectations that may come with it, whether it was a harness or a sort of freedom. For Matthieu, it was obvious that he had found his passion early on—and it rested in the land, rhythms of nature, things tended with care, patience. He seemed to contain a distinct knowledge of his place in the world, rare for someone his age. With unabashed charm and a lot of gesturing typical of the region, he exuberantly related fact and philosophy about grapes and wine-making. We were not bored and much of what he relayed was done through metaphor. Matthieu and his family produce wine from vines that range from 35 to 50 years old.

Matthieu Négrel making Christmas wine in the old way.

Standing in the vineyard, with Ste. Victoire as the backdrop, he told us about his life. How it was to plant a vine and wait—to harvest only after 5 years. Pointing out a vine planted when his grandfather was a young man and then another planted when he himself was a child, he laughed and said, “Things are very s-l-o-o-o-w here in Provence.”

Then he went on, “In Provence they say, when the vine is young it produces much. But the quality is medium. When older it produces less but the quality is much better. Ahhhh…but when it is the oldest it’s very wise and it holds it all inside and it gives out very little!”

On another day we traveled through the beautiful countryside on winding roads, climbing in elevation and finally came to a Religious House with lavender fields surrounding it. Tucked away in the Alpes de Haute Provence region, discreetly out of sight, three sisters of the Soeurs Coopératrices Maison St Joseph live in an old farmhouse. They are known for cultivating lavandan, a prized type of lavender only grown at this particular altitude, producing the highest medicinal quality essential oil, in the old way, mostly by hand and not technology. Sister Marie Michelle, who greeted us, had a similar glow about her as the one Matthieu had, but many, many more years.

Sister Marie Michelle

She showed us their fields and, even though it was late in the season, we could smell lavender faintly in the air. She talked about how they carefully harvested and let the blossoms lay in the sun a certain amount of time so that the oils they made would be at the best strength for all the ways they could be used. She bemoaned the fact that other lavender farmers used machinery that cut the stalks in such a way as to lessen the quality and then didn’t allow them to “strengthen” in the sun after harvest as needed. It was all done quickly, cut and dried—so to speak. And she was quite clear that what sold as lavender essential oils in the world market was lavandin, having much lesser properties, and not lavandan. I was curious how three elderly sisters managed all the fields and harvest until she told us that people from the local community helped. When the sisters are gone, will this art become lost?

I’m going to come full circle and talk a little about painting. I’m an artist, using mostly oils as my medium. During my lifetime, I periodically took a hiatus from that art form for various reasons. The last rationale was because I moved cross country and no longer had a studio—or so I told myself. I took up black and white photography for several years, but found it not as tactilely satisfying. For a long time, my friend and spiritual mentor Don Américo Yábar had been urging me to paint again and said it would be quite different than what I’d done before. I thought he meant that my subject matter and style would be esoteric based on my experiences in the last number of years. In the fall of 2009, after a 12-year pause, I began to paint again. It just seemed right somehow, without Don Américo ever mentioning it at all when I had been in Peru that summer. And I discovered what he may have meant—however else my canvases may eventually develop. When I was much younger I painted fast and furious, always with a goal in mind, turning out a completed work typically in somewhere between 4-8 hours. Now I’m painting on the same canvas for weeks, sometimes longer. Quite content in the process, I’m allowing the colors to emerge and what expression is more deeply inside me. Perhaps I’m becoming like the older vine Matthieu talked about. Not quite the elder and I’m not yet holding it all inside. Too much to discover still!

But I think what I’ve learned over the years, that is coming out in my painting, and what was echoed through the people we engaged with in Provence, is this. There’s great value to immersion in the integrity of a process. Then the quality of the outcome is naturally delivered. I’ve been taught patience for things to come to fruition. Some things need to happen for others to evolve. When you know this at a visceral level, it brings that joie de vivre written so plainly on the faces of those who live through that understanding like Sister Marie Michelle and Matthieu. It also takes faith—and sometimes more than a little stamina.

I just completed a three-day workshop at the Mountain Artists Guild with artist Mary Schulte exploring papier mache and concrete sculpture. Sculpture isn’t something I’d done before; I’d never been attracted or even curious. But I met Mary and saw her exquisite papier mache giraffes in June at the “Arte Natura” artists’ reception at the Prescott Center for the Arts Gallery where my own artwork was also exhibited. And something pulled at me; I was intrigued.

My first attempt at papier mache: a whimsical horse with twigs for legs and straw for mane and tail.

Her gentle soul emerged.

That “something” had been running under my skin for a while urging me to move out of the status quo. I long ago learned that when I get a solid internal signal I follow it—even though all the “whys” are unclear. And if the usual excuses of “not enough” time…money…you name it…jump up especially strong then I acknowledge the excuse but set it aside; I’m then certain I’m on the right track. I just follow my initial intuition because…I also learned something else many years ago. The part of me that seeks to maintain the comfort zone gets quite vocal when familiarity is threatened.

In her introduction Mary talked about the types of sculpting. You can carve away like you would with marble or wood. Or you can hand build, adding layer by layer, as in the case of the media we would use. Over the next three days we students—none of us having done anything like it before—engaged in a joint journey of discovery with Mary as our skilled guide.

We students agreed on several things:

Undertaking the exploration was exhilarating and fun;

There’s focused attention to learning;

One medium was easier than the other;

Just because one took more learning didn’t mean we’d rule it out;

Having a guide who knows the territory saves a ton of angst and wasted time;

Even though we did similar things, we each had our own unique signature;

By deciding to undertake even this small journey it instilled options and a further sense of freedom.

This bird was as feisty as the concrete medium. He became more raven-like as he emerged, grew claws and perched on a wooden branch.

Ultimately, you can look at everything you do for cues as to your own growth. The important thing is to be active. Get out of your comfort zone. Stretch yourself. Otherwise, you relegate yourself to a ho-hum life.

By virtue of its definition, personal growth requires you to carve away what no longer fits or serves you; and to add what does and build upon it.

For me, I learned that my other art capabilities are transferable to an area I hadn’t even considered. And those three days were well spent. Aside from learning a new skill I could add into my body of resources, it did something even more important. It served to open a doorway and leverage evolution—giving a clear announcement to myself that I’m on the move. Permission granted.

***

If you’d like to know more about Mary Schulte’s artwork or when she’ll offer workshops, contact her at vam@cableone.net. I recommend it!

At this point I’ve lost track of how many hours I’ve been up without sleep in transit from Ireland back home. I’ve just spent two weeks traversing Counties Clare, Kerry and Waterford on my folks’ 60th anniversary trip where I was their willing driver. We had quite memorable travels and I’ll probably share bits of it over time. I’ve been up since 1:30 AM Ireland time for a wake-up at 5 AM—and it’s gone on from there.

But now I’m sitting in the Newark, NJ airport in a restaurant called Gallagher’s Steakhouse tucked into a corridor in the back, thankfully away from the chaos of the airport. I was attracted by the Caesar salad with grilled shrimp, there being a noticeable absence of fresh veggies in the last two weeks.

My folks are safely settled over in Terminal A waiting for their plane home and I’m here in C with another four hours yet before I take the next leg. You’d think that with the many hours of travel and absolutely no sleep, plus the onerous stress of travel these days, that I’d just want to veg and people watch. Part of that was true.

If you sit in a place long enough you begin to notice the dynamics of the interactions or let your imagination run wild—at least I do. I guess the first thing that sparked my interest was when the server approached my table, a dead ringer for Hattie McDaniel, in a black and white uniform. It was clear in no time that she ran the show, firing off side retorts to the other servers and some kind of gesture shorthand I didn’t understand—and they immediately snapped to. Or a look that screwed up her face and they scurried away in response. I filed away a mental note for a potential story later.

My mind quickly ran off to other times when I sat in restaurants, parks or other places and gave myself leeway to imagine the lives of the inhabitants.

***

In 1998 I sat in a pub in Brighton, England passing time. I happened to have a journal with me. I’d been leisurely observing two elderly gentlemen on their third or fourth stout: Beamish. Paul McCartney singing “Yesterday” came through the sound system and one of the gentlemen softly sang along under his breath, ending with “Ahhhh…yesterday.”

“Do you remember when Hudson’s used to be down along the corner? Now they were ones who offered service, not like it is today. They had those boys with bicycles and baskets.”

“Yea…delivery. And they had so many things. Sometimes they’d even throw in the odd bottle of wine. You know, to show your worth to them.

A few minutes passed in silence.

“Yea…Christmas will be here soon.”

“My daughter always gives those abominable books. The ones she likes to read, you know. Not me. Can’t tell her anything though. Quite so. She just pops off.”

“Yea…Well, must be pushing off now. Thursday then.”

***

Sometimes I’d have an accomplice and we’d muse together. I remember years ago in a small bagel shop outside Bar Harbour, Maine when my companion and I tried to decide if the man and woman who worked the place were married. We decided they were and then made up a life for them when the town virtually shut down for the winter.

It’s part of the license given to a writer—and one who imagines life into being. It’s an indulgence but also a creative exercise. In the meantime, here in Gallagher’s Steakhouse in the Newark, NJ airport I can see the woman at the table in the corner stealing looks at me as I write this…perhaps wondering what I’m up to. Hmmm. I wonder what her story is.

Carla Woody

The Lifepath Dialogues offer an invitation toward embodiment of all that is life-affirming and the deeper meaning of sustainability. Themes are drawn from books "Calling Our Spirits Home" and "Standing Stark" and 20+ years as a conscious living mentor leading spiritual travel journeys with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers serving their communities, group and individual programs. Carla specializes in working with people who seek to live through their deeply held values. For more info see the “About” tab. The author may be reached via cwoody@kenosis.net. Follow this blog by becoming a fan on the Kenosis Facebook page.

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